Preface

Many books focus on how to publish content on the Web, or how to measure its success, or how to take existing text from print venues and make it suitable for the Web. But no book adequately focuses on creating text exclusively for the Web. Perhaps everyone thinks that the topic of writing has been adequately covered in such works as Strunk and White’s excellent little book, The Elements of Style, Third Edition (1979). Our view is that this assumption misses an important fact: Writing for the Web is fundamentally different from writing for print. We will unpack this fact to delve into how to write successfully for the Web.

In so doing, we fill an important gap in the literature. Other books about Web publishing, such as Mike Moran and Bill Hunt’s book Search Engine Marketing Inc., Second Edition (2009), focus on using the Web medium as a marketing tool, but spend only a few pages on the key success factor on the Web: writing. The old saying “content is king” rings ever clearer as the Web evolves. Search engines such as Google, and social media venues such as Facebook, accentuate the need for Web-centric writing. This book helps its readers write effectively for the Web by taking into account how search and social media usage affect readership and audience. This is not just a challenge; it’s an opportunity. Search and social media can help Web writers learn common audience attitudes to better engage their audience with relevant content.

The target audience for this book includes writers, editors, and content strategists. Though many of the examples and case studies apply to Web marketing (the field in which the authors have 45 years of accumulated Web experience), the book is intended to have a broader scope than just marketing writing. Writers for blogs, wikis, and various online media outlets can also benefit from the insights contained in this book. Web marketing is just an excellent source of rich Web publishing examples, because it clearly shows how effective writing has changed on the Web.

In print media, readers have already chosen to pick up the publication. This simple act implies a certain level of consent as to its relevance. Print writers can assume that the reader finds the publication at least nominally relevant and can get on with the business of presenting a compelling flow of information. But on the Web, visitors often don’t choose the specific page they land on through search or social media referrals. They must first determine the relevance of the page to their needs. For this reason, Web writers must demonstrate relevance before they can start engaging Web visitors in the flow of information. This step is often missed by Web writers, who wonder why so many Web visitors leave their pages without engaging in the content at all. This book shows writers, editors, and content strategists how to attract a target audience to content that is relevant to them, how to demonstrate this relevance when their target audience arrives on the site, and how to measure the depth of the audience’s engagement.

After an introductory chapter, the book spends the next two chapters discussing foundational concepts about how print and Web media differ. It focuses on how relevance determination and audience analysis differ on the Web, as opposed to print. This is necessarily deep stuff, because it depends on a rich body of literature in three different fields. We do not want to present the literature in a breezy fashion, out of respect for the great minds who have studied media determinism, relevance theory, and audience analysis over the centuries. Still, we do our best to make the topics accessible to those without backgrounds in these fields.

After the fundamentals are covered, Chapters 4 and 5 focus on how to write for the Web using a search-first perspective. Search-first writing is based on the premise that search engines provide a lot of insights into what is relevant to your target audience. Unpacking this assumption is central to this book.

This discussion has two major themes. The first theme relates to word choice: If you know what words resonate with your target audience members, you can write more effectively for them. You learn these words through keyword and social media research. The second theme is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7: how links determine the structure of Web information. Search engines use links to determine the relevance and credibility of content on the Web. They then use that information to sort search engine results for their users—the writers’ audience. Designing your site (Chapter 6) and collaborating with other sites to enable search engines to determine the relevance and credibility of your content (Chapter 7) are writing tasks unique to Web publishing. Some of the insights developed in these chapters are unique to this book.

The Web is a social medium—ever more so with new applications that connect like-minded people to communities centered on conversations. This is not a new phenomenon: The Web has always had a social element, as the value of Web content is directly proportional to the quantity and quality of links to it. The best way to get links to your content is by collaborating with the community of experts in your topics of interest. This is as true for traditional static Web pages as it is on Facebook. Still, there are aspects of social media writing that differ from traditional Web publishing. Chapter 8 delves into these distinctions.

Unlike print publications, Web sites are never done. The more you change them to accommodate your audience, the more effective they become. Measuring site effectiveness and making intelligent changes to better adapt to audience needs is the subject of Chapter 9.

Though we must call this book done and published, the Web will continue to evolve, requiring our continued updates and new insights. We will add to the gift of knowledge this book represents by maintaining a related Web site (www.writingfordigital.com) containing blog posts around our particular areas of expertise and links to the references you will find in our bibliography.

The Story of This Book

This book had its genesis in my M.S. thesis of the same title in scientific and technical communication at the University of Minnesota. When the thesis was published in August of 2008, I was collaborating with Frank Donatone and Cynthia Fishel on five search engine optimization courses for writers, editors, and content strategists at IBM. Education was part of my role as editor-in-chief of ibm.com. Frank and Cynthia brought fresh examples of the best practices to our course development as they consulted with their clients as Web effectiveness leads. The concept of marrying the content in the thesis with the coursework to create a comprehensive book on search-first writing for the Web was mutually agreeable to us.

What we didn’t realize when we entered into the coauthoring relationship was how much we would learn along the journey of writing this book. Like a jigsaw puzzle emerging before our eyes, the missing pieces presented themselves as fresh insights amidst the lessons we taught in our search courses. We could not have predicted the almost daily eureka moments as we wrote page after page and chapter after chapter. We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it.

—James Mathewson

Faribault, Minnesota